I’ve always wondered how Chinese and Korean restaurants manage to get the meat so very tender – no matter how hard I try, my results never even come close. I’ve had two attempts fairly recently to make Bulgogi, and while they were very tasty, the meat was still a little on the tough side. So, I’ve decided that 2016 is going to be the year that I crack this mystery. And it looks like I’m not the only one who’s wondered this!

Only two days to go until New Year’s Eve! I’m planning to host a molecular cocktail party and some of my best friends will be there so it needs to be epic.

Today is basically my last chance to buy anything that’s missing and I guess in order to figure that out I’ll need to make a definitive list of what I’m planning to make. I had a molecular gastronomy dinner party back in January last year. It was something of a qualified success since some of the recipes should have been started the day before, and I’d like to avoid that this time around.

I’m going to need to buy some ingredients since I don’t think I have quite everything; I also need a spherical mould for the frozen spherification but I think the silicone cake pop moulds they sell in Decobake should do the trick, and I can also pick up some more isomalt for the sugar blowing if I take a trip out there.

This is everything I’ll need:

Frozen Chocolate Wind

2 grams soy lecithin

85 grams dark chocolate

1 cup water

Aperol Gel Cocktails

Aperol Cocktail Base Ingredients

1 cup (8 oz) Aperol liquor

1/2 cup (4 oz) Laphroaig Scotch Whisky

1/2 cup (4 oz) honey syrup made by bringing to boil ½ water, ½ honey

1 rosemary sprig

Cocktail Gel Ingredients

4/3 cups (315 cm3/ 10.7 oz) cocktail base

2/3 cups (158 cm3 / 5.3 oz) water

8 Platinum gelatin sheets

Other ingredients

10 square ultra-thin edible films, cut in half (or round edible film)

1 slice dehydrated orange cut into small bits

20 small lemon balm leaves

Equipment

iSi Whip

Standard loaf pan (9″ x 5″ x 3″ / 2lb pan)

Spray bottle

Carbonated Mojito Spheres Ingredients

12 mint leaves

170 g (6 oz) white rum

170 g (6 oz) lime juice

128 g (4 ½ oz) water

6 tbsp white sugar

lime zest

small mint leaves to decorate

4.7 g Calcium Lactate Gluconate

0.8 g Xanthan

Alginate Bath

1000 g (35 oz) of filtered or low calcium water

5 g sodium alginate

Carrot Orange Mango Juice Spheres

Carrot Orange Mango Juice

300 ml (10 oz) carrot juice (about 1 1/2 pounds of carrots)

150 ml (5 oz) orange juice (about three oranges)

50 ml (1.7 oz) mango juice (about half mango)

sugar to taste

Spheres

250g (8.8 oz) carrot orange mango juice

5g calcium lactate gluconate (2%)

Extra juice to store the spheres if you are not planning to consume them within a few hours.

Marshmallows – 24 hours drying time to prepare sour dust, then prepare marshmallows and let set overnight. Will keep for up to a week.

Espresso pasta – 2-4 hours resting for cake mix; note this requires the whipper so can’t be done at the same time as carbonating the mojitos. Then 1-2 hours for the foam, also in the whipper. The recipe suggests doing the cake first then the foam.

Holly shots – set for 2-3 hours or overnight, will keep.

Based on this, it looks like I need to start the sour dust prep today and as soon as possible, then do a lot of the gelatine related things tomorrow. Finally on Thursday I should make the cakes in the morning and the espresso foam in the afternoon before people arrive. That will leave the following for during the party:

Having left myself not enough time to ice the cake before Christmas, I needed to figure out how to get a classic look without waiting for the marzipan to dry. So, I decided to try an experimental approach to icing the cake.

First, I rolled out a single packet of white marzipan as thin as I could manage, and used it to cover the cake fondant-style.

Normally the next step would be to cover the whole thing in Royal Icing. The problem here is that the oil from the marzipan is liable to seep into the Royal Icing if it hasn’t had enough time to completely dry between steps. Ideally the marzipan would be done a week ahead of the final icing, but I was doing this the day before Christmas Eve so I didn’t have many options.

I decided to use some red fondant that was left over from Hallowe’en. There was clearly a possibility that the red would seep through rather than the marzipan oil, but it seemed at least worth a try – the idea being that the fondant would form a buffer between the marzipan and the Royal Icing.

Again, I rolled it out as thin as I could manage, and covered the cake in a single piece. I brushed the marzipan layer with some warmed up honey to help the fondant to stick. Sieved apricot jam is more traditional here, but I was working with what was to hand!

It looked pretty awesome, although it wasn’t a very traditional Christmas cake style.

The next step was the Royal Icing; I’d normally be inclined to make this from scratch, but being short on time I used a just-add-water packet. I was very glad of the Kenwood mixer for the beating and stirring phases.

I made up the icing according to the packet, but it seemed to be aiming for a consistency that could be rolled out, so I ended up adding quite a lot more water to get a much softer icing which was closer in consistency to buttercream. This meant that I could use a palette knife to apply it with a nice textured finish.

It stuck to the fondant easily and pretty soon it was looking very much like an old-school traditionally iced Christmas cake.

The final touch was to get out the cheesy decorations, and the end result brought me right back to being 5 years old.

Not long before Christmas, a new biscuit tray turned up in our kitchen – a Wilton sandwich cookie pan to be exact. Now anyone who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for gadgets, so I had to try it out and see what kind of results I could get from it.

The packaging had some pretty inspiring pictures of interestingly coloured biscuits, but the actual recipes were not so inspiring. The first one I looked at called for something like a cup and a half of vegetable oil, and some butter flavoured essence, which sounded pretty revolting.

I did some searching and had a look in my recipe books and settled on this recipe:

Ingredients:

125g Stork margarine

150g granulated sugar

1 egg

250g plain flour

Red food colouring powder

Method:

Beat margarine and sugar together until white and fluffy

Slowly add egg, beating thoroughly

Mix together flour and food colouring and fold into mixture

Roll out into cookies and bake at 180 C

I used the red food colouring powder that I bought for making our red velvet wedding cake – it gives a great vivid red colour without having much impact on the texture the way some of the liquid food colourings do. The recipe above gave a fairly stiff dough which was the perfect consistency for rolling out.

For the first batch, I rolled it out to about half a centimetre thickness and cut circles that were the size of the outer lip in the tray.

When I put them into the tin, they basically filled the indentations, with a slight bulge to the top.

I baked them for 10 mins, but they were a little bit darkened on the outside when I took them out of the oven. Although they hadn’t really risen, they were clearly much to thick to sandwich together properly, and had quite a big lip around the outside.

Since there was plenty of dough left over, I had another attempt. This time I rolled it much thinner, maybe 2 millimetres, so that it sat quite low in the tray and only came up to the top of the inner lip.

This second batch took only 5 mins to cook, and were still a lovely red colour when they came out. They were solid and crispy all the way through, and just the right size for sandwiching.

Well I’ve decided to take a break from raiding, and from WoW in general for a little while. Between work and life, I need more uncommitted time right now. I’m sure that, as always, it will only be a temporary absence.

Given that they’re dairy-free anyway and this page has a gluten-free variation also, I just had to try them out.

The recipe basically involves making a meringue, then mixing in melted chocolate. This gives a stiff dough which is rolled into balls and coated in icing sugar – when you bake them they flatten out and give a ‘crinkle’ effect. They look very impressive even though they’re so simple to make, and they were very popular with the family when I took them visiting.

Welcome to the Crafty Rogue, dedicated to all kinds of Art and Crafts, as well as the MMORPG World of Warcraft.

I’m a complete craft addict. I’m better at some than others, whether due to time invested, available materials, or aptitude, but the power to create something useful and beautiful out of some pretty basic items has always fascinated me. I particularly love sewing, knitting, spinning, cooking, baking, sketching, painting and sculpting, although I’m always willing to try my hand at anything at least once.

I’m also a keen WoW player. I like to try all classes and roles; I believe the key to being a better team player is understanding what everyone else us going through so I have a variety of different classes at max level. At the end of the day though, my rogue is my oldest and most familiar character. She’s not the easiest to play; compared to my arcane mage there’s a lot more going on. And yet getting in the rogue frame if mind is like slipping back into my own skin. I can get in a flow state in a way that just doesn’t happen with the others.

I hope you enjoy reading about my adventures in these different worlds, although I’m sure I’ll have more fun living them!